Predicate Dispatch for Aspect-Oriented Programming

Developing a machine model natively supporting Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) is fruitful not only for implementing interpreters and compilers for AOP languages but also for understanding the essence of the AOP paradigm. This position paper shows a machine model based on open classes and predicate dispatch and it briefly describes a list of predicates that are necessary for modeling AspectJ. This machine model is useful for comparing AOP and Object Oriented Programming (OOP) on a side-by-side basis. The initial observation is that AOP is a natural extension to OOP with respect to language constructs.